Saturday, January 10, 2009
When Trademark Domain Lawyers Attack
I received an email from a regular reader named Pedro yesterday. Pedro recently received an email from a representative of the Lego group claiming a domain he owns that uses the word Lego in it, violated their trademark. The representative has said that Pedro must turn over the domain name to them. I think Pedro learned a good reason, but know must move on and move quickly. He does not intend to fight it, but I gave him a suggestion. I told him to hurry and register a new domain and use LSI terms instead of the word Lego, like maybe bricks and then transfer over all content to the new site and 301 redirect all the old domains to the new domains. The quicker you can do this the better, as to hopefully get the SERPS to quickly index the new domain and maybe get a temporary rush of the good page rank he had. Then I told him he should wait for the second notice before relinquishing the domain name. The longer you can hold them off, the better. Now I am no lawyer, so do this at your own risk. They second notice will likely follow in a few weeks. Hopefully in that time frame you will at least be able to get everything indexed and have a bit of time to change whatever backlinks you have control of to point to the new domain. You can read about Paul's ordeal on his blog post here. And here is a link to Pedro' Blog.
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2 comments:
Dave, I just thought I would pass along a little bit of my research. Pedro doesn't have to worry about turning his domain over IF he does one thing...make the site noncommercial. This means getting rid of all monetization methods...eBay, Amazon, Adsense, everything. Then, his site will be covered under fair use of a trademark. This is how all the "sucks" sites remain legal. Now, obviously an affiliate usually has no need for a noncommercial site but in this case it might be worth it just for redirection purposes. He could simply take down the site and put up a home page saying nothing more than "Welcome to my site about Legos, I think they're cool!" Now, he has a noncommercial critique site about Legos and is perfectly legal. He can then use his redirects to send his hard earned traffic to his new site. Below are a couple good references for this issue.
http://fairusenetwork.org/reference/tm-fe.php
http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/webpage.html
I also recommend putting something like the following in the footer or about page of a noncommercial site that uses a trademark:
This website is protected by the right to free speech granted by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and by 15 USC §1125(c)(4)(b) regarding noncommercial use of a trademark.
Thanks for the advice Dave, and thanks to Shawn to! Much appreciated, back to the grind...
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